Posts Tagged ‘mexico’

Tom and I have been busy adding 4 times the rivers and 3 times the lakes we had for North America. This adds in many “missing” hydro features that one might normally find on a 1:10,000,000 hydrologic reference map.

Why were they missing from the first version of Natural Earth? It’s hard to wade thru 1:1,000,000 features to figure which to add and an even tougher job to attribute them with the correct name and scale ranks. There’s another factor: these extra features are great if you’re making a watershed map, but can be a little noisy when used as a background layer in say a political reference map.

Cody Rice, now of the EPA but formerly of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) send along an amazing link last week. The CEC is a joint agency between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Specifically: USGS, Natural Resources Canada, INEGI-Mexico. Each country contributed base data for a 1:10,000,000 digital atlas. The data is available in many popular formats and is in the public domain. Better yet, it includes GIS data attributes like river name!

We’ve compared with our existing Natural Earth linework and identified which features were missing. For those we’re adding, we’ve adjusted the new linework a nudge here and there so it lines up with SRTM relief and our existing linework. We’ve also gone thru and created lake centerlines and applied scale ranks to all in three new steps (10, 11, and 12). We have some final polishing but will be releasing, along with some slight adjustments to the original data, by the end of January.

Do you have time to donate? Unlike ranks 0 to 9 (the original data), this new data will NOT come tapered. We’d like it to be and can show you how.

Know of a similar, attributed with name, 1:10,000,000 regional dataset we could adapt into Natural Earth to build out our coverage? Please let me know at nathaniel@kelsocartography.com.

Preview images below:

Red = new at rank 10. Blue = new at rank 11. Black = new at rank 12. Grey = old at ranks 0 to 9.

[Editor's note: This is my mashup for The Washington Post tracking the H1N1 swine flu outbreak. It is custom built using the Google Maps for Flash API. Reporting is by Washington Post staff and is updated several times each day. Zoom in and out of the map to see more detail and different symbolization approaches.]

Use our interactive mashup to track the distribution of swine flu (H1N1) cases around the world. Click on the map markers to learn more about cases at each location.

SOURCES: Staff reports; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and World Health Organization. Interactive by Nathaniel V. Kelso; Research by Madonna Lebling, Robert Thomason, Mary Kate Cannistra and April Umminger – The Washington Post. First published April 27, 2009 at 10 p.m.

Preparing for Christmas I posted on geographically themed shirts (view that post). Visitors to the Galapagos will be familiar with the theme of the shirt at left from Threadless.com. It’s barely office acceptable depending on the gender of the wearer and how “with it” your boss is.

Here are some other geographic finds perusing both Threadless.com (where most shirts are on blow-out sale prices for 2 more days!), Bustedtees.com, and Luckythreadz.com. Limited sizes on some. Click an image below to get the merchandise info.